Chapter 41: Mrs Austin’s Brother
"You’re joking, Sam."
"Dorset."
"Sam, mate. I am at my ma’s. I have just sat down to a Sunday roast. There are roast potatoes on a plate, Sam, that I have been thinking about all week."
"Three hours. Out by quarter to two. Game at four. Back by ten."
"...Sundays are sacred, Sam."
"Sundays are for football."
"...Are you kidding me."
"Three hours. I’ll buy you lunch at the services. Anything you want."
"...Right. Right. Fine. Tell my ma I love her and I am sorry."
"You tell your ma, mate."
He hung up. Click.
I sat for a second with my hand still on the receiver and let myself look properly at what I was about to drive two hundred miles for.
Charlie Austin.
Twenty-one years old, this afternoon, on a council pitch in Dorset, a bricklayer for his old man’s firm in West Berkshire who had been picked up by Poole Town in May after a season banging them in for Hungerford Town reserves.
Fourteen goals from eleven games in the back end of last season at Hungerford, while laying bricks on the weekdays. Nobody at any club above him had so much as rung.
I knew where the lad went. I had watched him go.
He was two years off twenty-five goals in a Championship season at Burnley. He was five years off eighteen Premier League goals for QPR, and a spell as the most talked-about English number nine outside the top six.
He was five years off a sale to Southampton for the thick end of four million pounds, and a top-flight career that a kid laying bricks in Hungerford this very Sunday had never once let himself believe was coming.
And here was the difference between Charlie Austin and Jamie Vardy, and I had worked it out on the rope at the trial that morning with half my head on the half-volley drill. Vardy I could sign.
Vardy was a fifty-quid-a-week lad on a council pitch nobody else had got to yet, and a beer mat with a sell-on clause was a real thing I could put in a real pocket. Charlie Austin I could not sign, not really, not to keep.
Poole had him on a contract. The bigger clubs were a season away from waking up. By the time Tilbrook could afford to be the club that owned Charlie Austin’s registration, Charlie Austin would be at QPR.
So the play was not the same play.
The play with Austin was a card with my private number on the back, put into the right hand on the right afternoon, against the day eighteen months from now when the bigger clubs all rang at once and the lad’s mum tried to remember the name of the one chairman who had bothered to drive to a sideline in Dorset before anybody else did.
You do not always sign the player. Sometimes you just make sure that when the lad is choosing, your name is the one his mother says first.
That was worth a Sunday and a tank of Raj’s petrol.
We were on the M3 by quarter past two. Brrm of the Astra in the slow lane. Raj had the flat cap on under protest. I had the Non-League Paper folded to page seventeen on my lap. Tk-tk-tk-tk of the indicator as he pulled out to overtake a lorry.
"You read about him at Maria’s last week, did you. The Austin lad."
"I read about him at Hussain’s last Wednesday."
"And you have been carrying him around in your head since."
"I have been."
"Sam."
"Yes."
"Are there more of these. After Vardy. After Austin. Are there going to be more Sunday afternoon drives to small towns I have never heard of for lads I have never heard of."
"A few."
"How few?"
"Three or four big ones. Half a dozen small ones."
"...Right. I am going to need a bigger car."
"Yes you are."
He drove. A motorway sign came up green and white for the West Country, and Raj changed lanes to get round a caravan doing fifty in the middle.
Poole Town’s ground was at the back of a leisure centre on a council estate not unlike Stocksbridge. About seventy people in the stand for a Sunday friendly against a side from Bournemouth’s reserves. Raj parked. Clunk of the handbrake. We got out. A gull stood on the corner of the stand roof and screamed at the car park, caw, caw, the way gulls do at the seaside when they have decided your chips are a question of when and not if.
The number nine was warming up at the goalmouth. Thump of a half-volley into the side netting.
---
Name: Charlie Austin
Age: 21
"Player": Conference South (Poole Town F.C.) CA: 95 / 200 PA: 168 / 200 Finishing 17. Anticipation 16. Heading 15. Aggression 16. A bricklayer who scores goals. Stubborn off the ball. Heads what nobody else heads.
---
He scored on twelve. Thwack of his head down on a cross, into the ground and up past the keeper, the way you head a ball when you have been heading bricks’ worth of crosses since you were a boy and you know that down beats anything.
He scored on thirty-one. Thump low into the bottom corner, the keeper a yard slow off his line, and Austin did not even celebrate the second one, just turned and jogged back to the halfway line with the face of a man clocking off a shift, because to Charlie Austin a goal in a Sunday friendly was a Tuesday’s wages, nothing to throw your shirt over.
A woman of about fifty in a blue cardigan was sat on the bench by the rope down the touchline with a flask of tea in her hands. She had been looking at the same lad since the warm-up the way you look at a son who has been put through a lot of things and come out the other end with his head still on.
I went over.
I sat down on the bench next to her.
"That number nine."
"That number nine."
"He yours?"
"He is, love."
"He scored two."
"He scores two most weeks. Mr Bowyer at Poole has been telling him for three months that the bigger clubs are looking. None of the bigger clubs has been on the phone, love. They tell him the bigger clubs are looking and they don’t ring him for three months and the lad is still on the bricks for his old man on the weekdays and I am not going to spend the next year of my life watching Mr Bowyer at Poole feed my Charlie sentences nobody at any of the bigger clubs is actually saying."
I looked at her for a second.
I took a card out of my inside pocket. Tilbrook Town F.C. I wrote a phone number on the back. My Nokia number. Blocky biro capitals my dad would have known the hand of.
"Mrs Austin."
"Yes, love."
"Sam Mercer. Chairman of Tilbrook Town Football Club. National League. We came out of administration last week. Ten-point deduction. We start the season Saturday the fourteenth of August against AFC Wimbledon at home."
"...Tilbrook."
"Marsh Road. Essex."
"I have heard of Tilbrook. I am Charlie’s mother, I am not stupid."
"...No, Mrs Austin."
"You are the man on the back page of the Standard this Wednesday with thirteen wins by April."
"...Yes."
She took the card. She looked at the number on the back. She looked at me.
"Mr Mercer."
"Yes."
"I am Charlie’s mother. I am not Charlie. I do not sign cards on his behalf. I will, however, sit him at my kitchen table after he has played for Poole on the Saturday after next, and I will tell him what I have just been told today by a man called Sam Mercer who came to a sideline in Dorset on a Sunday afternoon with his own private phone number on the back of a card. And we will see what we will see."
"That’s all I’m asking, Jeanie."
"...How did you know my name was Jeanie."
"You look like a Jeanie."
She laughed a small dry laugh.
"Mr Mercer."
"Yes."
"I have a brother used to drive a forklift down the docks at Tilbrook in the eighties. Worked the timber wharf, twenty-odd years, till they closed it. He’d have known your dad."
"...Probably did."
"What was your dad."
"Bill Mercer. He was on the cranes."
She went quiet a second, and something moved across her face the way it moves across the face of someone placing a name from a long time ago.
"...My brother had a Bill on the cranes he used to talk about. Said he was the only one on the wharf who’d lend you his flask and not want it filled back up." She looked at me properly then, for the first time, not as a chairman with a card but as a face she was checking against an older one. "You’ve got a look of a docker about you, son, under the office shirt. Get back in your car. Go and run your football club. I’ll talk to my Charlie."
I shook her hand.
I went and got Raj.
We drove back up the M3 at half past five with the Non-League Paper on the dashboard and a small ache in the lower back that had been there since the third rep of the bacon sandwich that morning.
"You been quiet for forty miles, Sam."
"Have I."
"You have. ...What."
"I have just had a Sunday."
"...A Sunday."
"A Sunday that, in my old life, I would have spent on a sofa watching a Wrexham save."
"...That bad."
"That good."
He drove the next five miles not saying anything.
Then he turned to me.
"You are an absolute lunatic."
"Eyes on the road, mate."
I leaned my head back against the seat and looked at the M3 going past in the long August evening light, and somewhere round about Basingstoke services, with the Non-League Paper on the dashboard and a Vardy on a beer mat in my inside pocket from yesterday and a Jeanie Austin who had a brother who had lent my dad nothing because my dad was the one doing the lending, the small tight thing in my chest that had been a knot since Monday started to come undone.
[SYSTEM] Two strikers in two days, Samuel.
"Two strikers in two days."
***
Thank you for reading and tnx for the support.
